laelaps | January 15, 2008Bora and Reed both put in a Herculean effort in getting the 2nd edition of The Open Laboratory ready in time for the Science Blogging Conference this weekend, but the book is finished and now up for sale at lulu.com! The book will also be showing up in stores and on major online bookstores in the near future, and I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy.
laelaps | January 15, 2008
This is Leo, a snow leopard (Panthera uncia) at the Bronx zoo that was taken in by the zoo recently. Leo was orphaned at a very young age, too young to fend for himself in the wild, and with cooperation from officials in Pakistan was transferred to the Bronx zoo for care. The zoo has so much success with snow leopards that a new snow leopard habitat is being constructed at the Central Park zoo, set to open in the spring of 2009.
laelaps | January 14, 2008While my post about feral cats from last week might be a bit controversial to some, the LAPD is getting some help from from feral cats with a rat problem. According to the Los Angeles Times, there are a number of places in LA with rat and mice problems, and an animal rescue group has placed a number of feral cats at police stations with rat/mice infestations in order to help solve the problem. The cats don't catch and kill the mice and rats as much as drive them out of the area, it seems, but it still presents a benefit to both the cats (which might have otherwise been destroyed) and the…
laelaps | January 14, 2008
The trailer for the film The Land That Time Forgot.
My first impression of what a dinosaur was conjured up images of creatures impossibly big and toothy, real-life monsters with names that sounded like they could very well have been out of mythology rather than science. I didn't know that they weren't supposed to drag their tails or that they had been moved out of the swamp by the Dinosaur Renaissance; all I needed to know was that they were creatures that lived and died a long, long time before I was born, even though my imagination didn't let them rest soundly. I know a lot more about…
laelaps | January 14, 2008
According to USA Today, a number of dinosaur tracks have been found in the Washington, D.C. area by amateur paleontologist Ray Stanford. Stanford has also found including a potentially new species that he will announce with Johns Hopkins paleontologist David Weishampel in the near future, although for now all that is being said of the find is that it's a kind of "Cretaceous Roadkill."
Greg has the scoop on potential evidence for the "island effect" in Thecodontosaurus. He was kind enough to send me to paper ("The age, fauna and palaeoenvironment of the Late Triassic fissure deposits of…
laelaps | January 13, 2008Zach has got the latest edition of the Boneyard up for your viewing pleasure (and many thanks to Zach for giving me my own little subsection). The next edition will be up the Saturday after next over at The Dragon's Tales, so get those links to me or Will as they crop up!
laelaps | January 13, 2008
A mother lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) with her child, taken at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | January 12, 2008
One of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) cubs from the Bronx zoo hops over her sister. I haven't been back to the zoo since May of this past year so I have no idea if they are still there, but they are assuredly much bigger now than when I took this photograph.
laelaps | January 11, 2008A lot has been said as of late about reconstructions of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures on various blogs, and I'm not one to keep my mouth shut on the issue. I'll put up my own take on the issue tomorrow, but for now here's some Tyrannosaurus Alan spots that'll help set the stage;
laelaps | January 11, 2008
A female gharial (Gavialis gangeticus).
Ever since Baryonyx walkeri was announced to the scientific community in 1986, spinosaurid dinosaurs have often been compared to crocodylians (at least as far as the construction of their skulls are concerned), the similarity going so far as to result in one African spinosaurid receiving the name Suchomimus ("crocodile mimic"). In the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, however, Rayfield et al. put such comparisons to the test to see if spinosaurid dinosaurs had bites that were functionally similar to living crocodylians.
The…
laelaps | January 11, 2008
An African elephant (Loxodonta africana).
Part of what makes ecology such a fascinating subject is the complexity of interactions between species, especially when things don't happen in exactly the manner we might initially hypothesize. Such is the case with a paper just published in the journal Science by Palmer et al. called "Breakdown of an Ant-Plant Mutualism Follows the Loss of Large Herbivores from an African Savanna," which shows that the loss of large herbivores initiates a cascade of ecological changes, changes which have some important effects for acacia trees and the ants that…
laelaps | January 11, 2008
Most of the photographs of Amur tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) I post here are of an older female named Zeff at the Bronx zoo, but this tiger (also a resident at the Bronx zoo) is a younger male named Sasha. The two can be told apart from each other (as well as any other tiger) because each tiger has a unique stripe pattern, allowing for fairly easy identification of individuals.
laelaps | January 10, 2008Feral cats are often portrayed as the scourge of of island ecosystems, killing off or pushing out endemic species at an alarming rate. To an extent such a reputation is deserved, but a new study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that the elimination of a top-level introducted predator can lead to an explosion in the numbers of other predators that were being controlled by the "top cat."
While cats are certainly a problem in many areas where they were introduced, often preying upon adults and chicks in the nest, rats attack the birds from the other side of the…
laelaps | January 10, 2008
This shot, taken at the Bronx zoo, is of one of the snow leopard (Panthera uncia) twins and her mother. The photograph was a bit difficult to get as I was shooting through a glass barrier and the shadows were very strong, but I still think it came out pretty well. Like "true" leopards (Panthera pardus), the young stay with their mother until they are old enough to hunt on their own (although they usually remain past when they are proficient at hunting for a time, approaching sexual maturity being a likely marker for separation between mother and cubs).
laelaps | January 9, 2008Wouldn't you know it? I'm in the middle of writing a nice summary on spinosaurid bite mechanics and all hell breaks loose in the journals. Besides the nonsense about Psittacosaurus, there's a new paper just out in Nature featuring a new cuddly little creature called Plumulites bengtsoni, that is if you think ancient armored worms from the Lower Ordovician are cuddly. I don't have the time to blog about it right now, but here's a look at the Plumulites;
Plumulites bengtsoni. From Vinther, J.; Van Roy, P.; Briggs, D. (2008) "Machaeridians are Palaeozoic armoured annelids." Nature, Vol 451, pp…
laelaps | January 9, 2008
The skull of Psittacosaurus. From Osborn 1923.
Despite the large amount of evidence that birds are the direct descendants of a group of theropod dinosaurs some researchers continue to protest the association, one of the most vocal opponents of the idea being Theagarten Lingham-Soliar. Working with Alan Feduccia and Xiaolin Wang (two other outspoken critics of the same topic), Lingham-Soliar published a paper last year proposing that the "protofeathers" on the fossil Sinosauropteryx were collagen fibers and not feathers at all. I didn't buy the hypothesis (see this summary for an excellent…
laelaps | January 9, 2008
While the mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei)studied by Diane Fossey might be the most familiar to the public, the vast majority of living gorillas are Western (or lowland) gorillas, Gorilla gorilla. While myths about these animals had circulated for some time, they were officially named in 1847 (the mountain species not being named until 1903), but of the two gorilla species they are generally less studied. Western gorillas differ from mountain gorillas in that they eat much more fruit and are more arboreal, and some populations have been observed to use tools (the elusive Cross River…